MI PU2 Promo 9758/2019/02/Q1 Town A, Town B and Town C are located in Wakandi Country. The distance between Town A and Town B is 60 km and the distance between Town B and Town C is 20 km. A railroad connects Town A to Town B (see diagram). A manufacturer plans to deliver a certain number of containers of its goods daily from Town A to Town C. To support this plan, the Wakandi government decides to build Interchange Station S and a road connecting this station to Town C (see diagram). Once the road is built, the goods manufacturer can deliver its containers from Town A to Town C by a combination of rail and road via Interchange Station S. The cost to deliver the containers daily by rail is 300 per km.

- ((i))
Show that the daily total delivery cost, , of the containers from Town A to Town C is given by
where km is the distance between Town A and Interchange Station S.
- ((ii))
Hence use differentiation to find the value of that gives a stationary value of , giving your answer correct to 2 decimal places. Show that is a minimum for this value of .
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Worked solution
7((i))
1. Find the distance SB and use Pythagoras' theorem to express the road distance SC in terms of $x$.
Since the distance from A to B is 60 km and km,
Using Pythagoras' theorem on the right-angled triangle ,
2. Calculate the total cost by combining the cost of rail and road delivery.
Cost for rail delivery from A to S
Cost for road delivery from S to C
Total daily delivery cost, (Shown)
T = 200x + 300\sqrt{x^2 - 120x + 4000} \text{ (Shown)}
7((ii))
1. Differentiate $T$ with respect to $x$ using the chain rule.
2. Equate the derivative to zero and rearrange to isolate the square root term.
For a stationary value, set :
Note: For this equation to hold, the left-hand side must be negative (since the principal square root is always positive), which implies .
3. Square both sides, solve the resulting quadratic equation, and reject the extraneous root.
Using the quadratic formula:
Since we established earlier that , we reject .
4. Use the second derivative test to verify that this value of $x$ yields a minimum cost.
Using the quotient rule:
Multiply the numerator and denominator by :
Since , we have for all real .
Thus, is a minimum at .
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